Bio

Lei Chen, is a chair professor in the Data Science and Analytics Thrust and Artificial Intelligence Thrust at HKUST (GZ), Fellow of the ACM and IEEE. Currently, Prof. Chen serves as the dean of Information Hub, the director of Big Data Institute at HKUST, MOE/MSRA Information Technology Key Laboratory. Prof. Chen’s research interests include Data-driven AI, knowledge graphs, blockchains, data privacy, crowdsourcing, spatial and temporal databases and query optimization on large graphs and probabilistic databases. He received his BS degree in computer science and engineering from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, MA degree from Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand, and PhD in computer science from the University of Waterloo, Canada. Prof. Chen received the SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award in 2015, Best research paper award in VLDB 2022. The system developed by Prof. Chen’s team won the excellent demonstration award in VLDB 2014. Prof. Chen had served as VLDB 2019 PC Co-chair. Currently, Prof. Chen serves as Editor-in-chief of IEEE Transaction on Data and Knowledge Engineering and an executive member of the VLDB endowment.

Bio

Professor Xiong Hui holds esteemed positions at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) as a Chair Professor and the Associate Vice President for Knowledge Transfer. Before joining HKUST(GZ), he was a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University and held the position of Chief Scientist (Smart City) and Deputy Dean at Baidu Research Institute (T11), overseeing five research labs. Prof. Xiong has received numerous honors and awards, including being elected as Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Distinguished Scientist of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and Fellow of the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI) and China Computer Federation (CCF). Prof. Xiong currently serves as the ACM SIGKDD Secretary, the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Encyclopedia of GIS, the Deputy Director of the CCF Expert Committee on Big Data, and the Editor-in-Chief of Nature npj | Artificial Intelligence. He is the principal investigator of the National Key R&D Program of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. He has received prestigious awards such as the ACM SIGKDD Service Award and the AAAI Best Paper Award. He is also recognized for his talent cultivation, as many of his PhD students have become tenure-track professors worldwide.